Flat Plains
by stupique
Summary: The XY category was empty .


Hello all. This is one of my short stories I wrote as a school assignment. I didn't know what category to put it under so I placed it here. The genre too gave me a headache. I don't really know what to place it under. The story may be a little weird. But I hope you'll enjoy it all the same!

Inspired by A Child Called It (Literally) and The Lovely Bones. Both are great books!

* * *

**Flat Plains**

When I first realized I possessed 'sense', I found myself drowned in this sac of colorless fluid. The liquid slipped and poured around me, a tub of slimy eels, fighting for space in their own world. Their tails tickled me at the toes, which looked like the joint webs of frogs, raw and uncooked. Absentmindedly, I stuck out the jellied meat in my mouth and tasted the fluid. It was sour and bitter at the same time as if the hydrochloric acids of my mother's stomach seeped through the pores into my heaven. But I drunk on it hungrily like a child would, as gushes of it streamed into my translucent body. I fed and fed, until I knew not the difference between my saliva and the colorless aqua.

I waited for a long time. For light to reflect through the glossed walls of my mother's womb, for somebody to pull me out, for somebody to un-drown me. When the time finally came, I was not surprised or shocked or anything. Instead I felt an odd sense of calm, as if I had drank all the calamity of the world, so that what was left was a solid piece of white paper. The light was yellow I think, a stark contrast to the dark room. And the first thing I touched was the rubber gloves that picked me up. Then the rays shot through the opaque lids of my eyes and I saw my own reflection.

I wanted delve back into my heaven.  
And grow up right again.

There were times I wondered what I have done wrong.  
Or what did I do right.

Because the next thing I knew was the peculiar gaze from Mother's eyes. Her eyes were deep-set and the iris a strange mix of green and blue complimented with a murky wash that shrouded her sight. The pupils were constantly shifty, the round jewels jutting from corner to corner, so that they bounced off the edge of the curve-ins. When she picked me up, I could feel her hands shaking underneath my arms, the vibration digging into my skin. Then she would smile, the nervous smile that was a thin line away from the deathly stare.

Papa never liked it when she held me. He would steal me away in a quick pull and Mother would go out laughing maniacally, her head thrown back, the golden hair cascading down her back, the slobs of saliva flowing freely from her mouth. Papa was kind and sweet. He would set me down, pat me on the head and cuddle me in his arms, soothingly saying, 'It's okay, it's okay' over and over like an immortal god. He was sweet, he was kind. Yet I could feel the same shivering hands that were washed with hesitation.

I was shipped back to the white room.  
The same sterile, medicine-smelling one.

I could feel the shiver in his hands when the man in the white coat touched the area above my abdomen. The forceps gleamed happily under the same bright light. His eyes were covered by the transparent goggles but I could see the same nervousness in his pupils. As his gloved hands rubbed against my skin, I felt the odd static that tingled my senses. I wasn't scared or anything. I wasn't scared that he was going to draw my colon and attach it to my abdomen. I wasn't scared that there was going to be blood, or it was going to hurt.

As if overwhelmed by the immense faltering of uncertainty, I screamed.

When I went to the toilet, I had to call Papa and it made me blush. He would smile kindly down at me and ask me to hold on for a moment. Then he busied himself with the preparation of requisites. First a warm towel, then the blue sterile plastic bag with the detachable sticky part, followed by the alcohol swab that stung so bad it made me cry.

I would sit myself on the toilet bowl cover and wait patiently, feeling the waste squeezing its way through my large intestine. Papa would then enter and chuckle pleasantly placing the ritual items on the familiar space between the sink and the toilet bowl.

"Papa, it's coming."  
"Just relax. I'm going to attach the plastic now."

Without warning, the sludge of excretion came out from my abdomen and dribbled down the blue plastic, making a disgusting wrinkly sound that rung through the concrete slab walls. I once asked Papa to let me look inside. He smiled at me and said, "No darling, you'll get dirty." I always thought he meant the excretion but I guess it was a read-between-the-lines riddle. Papa reached out for the warm towel and patiently cleaned the round opening in my abdomen where the sludge spilled out. Tearing open the small alcohol swab square he dug at the folds of the opening and the stinging came – the constant rain of needles.

The world was a beautiful place. After the rain especially. It made gave me the hope that all the wavering feelings were washed away to some other universe far off. The curb next to the road was meant for me to walk. The little elevated platform that could only house one foot at a time required a certain amount of skills to catwalk on. One foot after the other, one foot after the other, I would walk till the sun set ablaze in the sky and sunk into its heaven. I liked the clinking noises of mechanism, the rough queasy smell of gasoline and the round patches of oil rainbows that glistened mockingly.

It made me forget.  
Forget that I ever existed.

Or the fact that I was flat and smooth down below.

When I go to the toilet, sometimes I would peek at myself and hope that someday I would be able to press the buttons of the toilet bowl, either the Crescent moon or the Waning Gibbous. If I was taking a dump, I would press the Waning Gibbous. If I was just urinating, I would press the Crescent. Then I would hear the rush and gush of water and the immediate sucking sounds that slurped in all the waste.

Once in school, somebody thrust a book in my hands and ran laughing away. I peered down at the title and it read, 'A Child Called It'. I was a lovely book, filled with touching literature that shook you in your heart. Then I realized the funny irony.

I was literally, 'It'.

Papa called me Faith.  
Mother just laughed in my face, her eyes rolling in her sockets.  
Children just like me called me Freak.

Doctors called me a Miracle.

I was back in the white sterile room with the awful scent of medicine.

There were white coated people all around me. They peered through the metal frames of their glasses, with an odd glint in their eyes – the very same one Mother uses on me. I could feel the heat from their eyes, like sun rays shooting through my body. I felt transparent. I kicked around and realized I was naked, the watery texture of the sheets rubbing against my raw skin. I wanted to cry and scream but my hands and feet were restrained by rubber strings which rebounded back into its original shape when I pulled at it.

"To have ever lived, he's a miracle."  
"No, it's a she, or he or an it?"  
"With no opening, no presence of genitals, how could you classify it as a he or she?"  
"Look at its below, it's smooth, like a sheet of white paper."  
"Have you checked the Karyotype scans?"  
"Yes sir, it's a phenomenon."

Even though I was bounded tightly to the bed, I could see the flashing images reflected through their gleaming glasses. I saw the scan, its glossy print with streaks of white that cut through my eyes. Then I saw the bottom right corner of the page.

The XY category was empty.

Papa was bathing me one day. He soaped me and placed my little rubber duckling exactly where I wanted it to be. He scrubbed diligently, under my armpits, down the corners of my neck and even behind my ears where dirt tended to gather.

"Papa, are you cold? Why are you shivering?"  
Papa ignored me.

The soap filled the entire tub and sloshed over the granite surface of our floor. Pitter. Patter. Slippy. Splatter. The puddles of water reflected my image and I saw a raw skinned child, the folds of my skin wrinkly like an old person's. Wisps of golden hair thrust out from my pores, straggly threads of it. I had no eyebrows, the area above my eyes smooth and sloping. My eyelids were just folds of flesh, hairless and bloated. I looked at my own eyes, I couldn't see the color of it, the bottomless scared me. Then I stared at my underneath and reached out for it. I had seen pictures of genitals in the science textbook. For girls, it was a short stub, for boys it was an extra flab of skin and meat. I caressed my flat plain which felt so empty all of a sudden.

"Papa, why am I flat down there?" Pitter. Patter. Slippy. Splatter.

"Because you're special." He said, holding my throat, his grip dangerously hard.

The grip was a familiar one I knew because Mother had held me like that before. She was out in the garden playing with the sunshine beams that poured over the golden locks. She skipped, she jumped, she caught the butterflies, she patted the little worms. Mother laughed and screamed childishly, the whites of her eyes oddly spreading. Then she saw me. And her laughter died and buried itself in the graves. She stared at me curiously, and sneered, her eyes widening eccentrically and the corners of her lips pulling towards the ends of her face. Staggering forward, her hands held out straight like a zombie, she clutched my shoulders and pulled me into her embrace.

I could smell her hair, which had the scent of sunshine. I dug deep into the crook of her neck, desperately seeking for warmth. She held me lovingly, soothing my bald head with wisps of golden hair just like hers, her grip getting tighter and tighter by the second, so that I was the prey of an anaconda, wrapping itself tenderly round and round.

"It's okay, it's okay, my poor genderless child."

When I felt Papa's grip around my neck, I knew darkness was going to come.  
I was after all, the child called 'It'.

* * *

Constructive criticisms please.


End file.
